Re: Any research putting c above ada?

[Craig Franck <clfranck@worldnet.att.net>]

jsa@alexandria (Jon S Anthony) wrote:
>
>In article <5kb91p$1bc@bcrkh13.bnr.ca> kaz@vision.crest.nt.com (Kaz Kylheku) writes:
>
>> Some aspects of CS have a scientific flavor; there is a fair degree
>> of empiricism.  Whenever you prototype some software, or profile the
>> performance of a program, you are doing an experiment that is not
>> unlike a scientific experiment. You
>
>That's only a part of the story.  In CS you are dealing with
>intentional artifacts and IMO that alone snuffs the "science" part.
>As I say, others will disagree...

Well, it is no longer "Natural Science". If you think of science as 
generalizing through observation and application of specific methods 
then, as Kaz said, it only has a scientic "flavor". I think the best 
analogy is one of construction: you are a computer engineer, a 
technologist who builds things and constructs models. The people who
build those billion dollar chip factories rely on semiconductor 
physicists who would be much more of a scientist than the fellow 
writing packages in VHDL. I think you need to distinguish software
engineering from the science behind the technology. Lumping it all 
into "CS" is more of a convience than anythings else; you have one 
term for everything at the expense of being imprecise. When you lump
in cost management and risk assessment quite often it seems like it
has as much to do with actually writing code as your personnel manager
keeping track of how many vacation days you have left.

-- 
Craig
clfranck@worldnet.att.net
Manchester, NH
All evolution in thought and conduct must at first appear
as heresy and misconduct. -- George Bernard Shaw